I canonici ospedalieri di S. Antonio di Vienne e la Sardegna

The aim of the PhD research is that of reconstructing the documentary body relating to the presence and action of the hospitaller Order of St. Anthony of Vienne in Sardina (XIII-XVI centuries). Starting from the analysis of the state of the art of the studies on the history of the order and its presence in Sardinia, a first- hand research on the sources produced by the Antonines community and on other sources dating back to the same historical period has been carried out with the purpose of providing both a historical analysis and a critical edition of such documents. St. Anthony’s order, extremely powerful in the Late Middle Ages and widespread throughout Europe, collapsed in modern age to the extent that it was suppressed at the end of the XVIII century. Antonines were well known for their healing powers of a disease, the ‘St. Anthony’s fire’, identified during the XVIII-XIX centuries with ergotism (food poisoning), but actually related to all those illnesses of a gangrenous nature. The analysis of the existing literature on the subject has shown the long-standing difficulties encountered by Antonian historiography, due to the scattering of the sources of information and to the influence of popular myths surrounding the illness. For what concerns the activity of Antonines in Sardinia, the sources available to researchers were few in number and often suffered from a superficial and non in depth enough interpretation. In the past, indeed, the vacuum in the documentary body has led scholars to believe that their presence in Sardinia had been marginal and not well documented. A more recent investigation of unpublished documents has provided researchers with new sources which contribute to highlighting the real dimension of the Antonian presence in the island. The documents, in this regard, prove that the canons managed a number of properties, certainly in Cagliari, Oristano and Sassari, collecting donations and revenues to be sent to the headquarter in Dauphiné. Their presence, although discontinuous, is documented as much as the practice of certain activities which made them well known, from their begging to their pig farming. The new element emerging from the analysis is rather the fact that assisting ill Sardinians was never a priority for them. The body of documents collected and presented as an appendix to this research contributes to providing a fairly complete picture of this page of Sardinian history which had until now been left uncompleted and was not gravitating within the Iberian orbit as in the case of the rest of Middle Age and Modern eras. Through the comparison between different sources, this research shows how and to what extent Sardinian micro-history fits within the contest of European macro-history